Any suggestions to fix this issue (and hopefully avoid this going forward) will be welcome.

Edit: The process is not running - I forgot to mention that in the post. Should I go about changing the mysql.cnf file to point to a different location for the socket location (or perhaps add a link to it)?

the error message may be the same but what's causing it might not be - I don't have a firewall blocking the port, disk is not out of space, my.cnf points to 127.0.0.1. Any suggestions to troubleshoot and/or fix the issue would be quite welcome.
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ali haiderDec 11 '12 at 18:32

I think I was not clear in the post - when I mentioned MySQL does not start, it meant that the process is not up. Startup is not working through service mysql start option. Thanks
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ali haiderDec 12 '12 at 17:03